Copy Data Management for SAP HANA

Easily Create, Manage and Deliver Copies of SAP HANA

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system. Customers are steadily migrating to the HANA platform because of the performance improvements afforded by running the database from memory. Storage, however, remains a core component of the SAP HANA infrastructure because it is used to deliver persistency to data and to support queries that may not have all the necessary data in memory.

Combining SAP HANA with flash storage results in many benefits:

Substantial increase in application performance

Higher storage efficiency through data deduplication and compression

Offload at-rest encryption to the storage arrays to avoid the server impact of using HANA’s native encryption.

Offload data replication to the storage array instead of log shipping at the HANA level

The combination of reduced storage footprint along with lower operational costs of flash make it economical compared to spinning disk environments

Even with all these benefits, SAP HANA users are still faced with copy challenges. Whether trying to meet stringent data recovery requirements or delivering data sets for training, test, or development, organizations are struggling to meet the demand for data copies.

How Catalogic Helps with SAP HANA

By orchestrating the creation and use of storage snapshots and replicas with SAP HANA, ECX becomes a powerful, next generation copy solution, whether used for recovery scenarios or serving copies to data consumers. ECX integrates specifically with the SAP HANA APIs, avoiding the need for pre-scripts/post-scripts for snapshotting, as well as for recovery mounts.

Coupling this with the “in-place” copy data management benefits of Catalogic across multiple storage platforms, ECX is truly an industry leading solution for protecting and recovering SAP HANA environments.

Among the powerful benefits provided by ECX:

Storage array snapshots complete in seconds. This is far faster than the using the legacy “Backint” interface to create a backup copy using data streaming.

Snapshots create negligible impact on HANA servers during backup. Queries can run quickly even during backups.

Orchestration of application-consistent replication of snapshots for disaster recovery by leveraging the underlying storage replication engine.

Instant Recovery in case of data loss by utilizing zero-footprint clones from either the primary or replica copy.

Monitoring RPO compliance through snapshot registration in the SAP HANA Backup Catalog as well as via Catalogic reports.

How It Works: No More Scripting

With ECX, users create copy policies that define key copy metrics: how often to make copies, where the copies will reside (local, remote or both), how long copies are retained and so on.

Once a policy is created, it can be applied easily to any SAP HANA workload. No more complex scripting or working with multiple tools; just click-and-apply ease of use.

The ECX copy process is agentless, giving you true application awareness without the maintenance headaches of agent-based solutions.

The meta-data catalog at the core of ECX tracks all copies, allowing you to search, audit and report on copy data. ECX also handles copy deletion, ensuring that you only retain the data you really need.

In addition, ECX provides deep integration with SAP HANA which delivers a good deal of high-level functionality generally not found in competing solutions:

ECX is completely agentless. No agents are required, either for physical servers or virtual servers.

One-touch recovery back to the original destination is provided by automating the mountpoint handling. Mountpoint renaming can be customized as needed.

ECX recovery offers the flexibility to use either Fibre Channel or iSCSI to mount disks. This makes it easy to mount copies to systems that may not be on the SAN, such as development workstations.

A centralized, single pane of glass is used to manage copy processes for all support applications.

Coverage Details

ECX supports both physical and virtual instances of SAP HANA. Support is provided for the following:

For the latest supported systems and complete support matrix and configuration requirements,
consult the SAP HANA support page.

SAP HANA Backup Using Pure Storage Snapshots

This nine-minute demonstration video shows how ECX can take data consistent snapshots of SAP HANA. ECX uses agentless technology to discover the storage LUNs associated with the SAP HANA instance and it then leverages Pure Storage FlashRecover snapshots to capture data. This demonstration video uses the Pure Storage FlashArray, but similar features are also supported for other storage platforms.

Our new Catalogic ECX release 2.6 expanded the application support matrix considerably by adding SQL physical hosts, Epic EHR with InterSystems Cache environments, physical server basic file systems (Windows, Linux, AIX) and VMware pRDMs. On top of all these enhancements, we were also tremendously excited to add support for SAP HANA environments

It

Making and using database copies has become an IT burden that impacts IT operations and slows down software development and reporting/analytics. By adding an intelligent copy data solution to your Pure Storage environment, you can break down barriers between IT and Dev/DBA groups in the organization and deliver benefits to everyone. This 30-minute webinar will provide you with a high-level, value-based explanation of how Catalogic can transform your database environment through a simple, software-only solution. The webinar is suitable for IT architects, storage admins, developers, DBAs, etc.

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